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Digital Government Malaysia: Standardisation and Open Standards are Vital

During MAMPU’s Public Sector CIO CONVEX 2016 event, the “government CIO agency” had also launched the Public Sector ICT Strategic Plan (PSISP), a blueprint that would steer the implementation of Malaysia’s digital government over the next five years.

Director of ICT Strategic and Architecture Development Division at MAMPU, Puan Hamimah Ibrahim, later presented MAMPU’s direction for public sector IT delivery, one of which is from being a service provider to becoming a service facilitator.

She admitted, “This would require more collaboration across all agencies to reduce duplication of processes. What we need to move towards becoming is a facilitator, whereby we proactively provide services for the whole lifecycle of a Malaysian citizen – from birth all the way to their last breath.”

Traditionally, this requires several government agencies to come into play to allow a typical citizen to acquire their birth certificate, national identity card, driving license, marriage certificate and so on and so forth.

What if this process was streamlined so that all these services could be obtained via one portal. Puan Hamimah also added that ideally, “…we don’t have to wonder to what comes next, as these services will automatically come to you.”

Proaction

According to Puan Hamimah, the objective to be one step ahead when providing citizen services. No doubt, government agencies have to move autonomously, without redundancy and with clear outlines of responsibilities.

To provide these, she said there has to be collaboration between government and the citizens, and one of the basic enablers is enterprise architecture (EA), a discipline that helps organisations structure strategies to achieve current and future objectives.

She also added, “We feel that standardisation and open standards are important going forward, because we need to leapfrog towards what we are aiming for under the strategic ICT plan, which is a digital government.”

Elaborating further about Enterprise Architecture in the bigger scheme of things, Puan Hamimah said, “The role of EA is to put business and tech together and ensure it evolves dynamically in tandem with new technologies coming out and also the progressiveness of our citizens.”